1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a thinner composition for improving coating property of a resist and for removing the same, and a method for manufacturing a semiconductor device or a thin film transistor liquid crystal display device by using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a process for manufacturing a semiconductor device, a working process including applying a photo-sensitive resin composition to a wafer, transferring a designed pattern thereto and forming a micro-fine circuit pattern such as a semiconductor integrated circuit through etching refers to photolithography. The photolithography includes achieving a desired micro-fine circuit pattern through a series of processes including applying, exposing, developing, etching and stripping.
In this regard, the exposing process is executed by minutely exposing the desired pattern on a coating film using a light in UV ray range as a short wavelength, therefore, becomes sensitive to a contamination source. Accordingly, a residue of photoresist applied to a substrate during applying, or contaminants may become a contamination source during exposing process. Therefore, these materials should be removed in advance. Herein, a thinner composition (for removing edge beads) has been used in the above process.
Meanwhile, since the photoresist using KrF and ArF (including ArF immersion) light source with a short wavelength has recently been employed, the extent of using the photoresist increasingly influences upon production costs of the integrated circuit. Accordingly, there has been a requirement for reducing the extent of using photoresist to save expenses. For this purpose, a reducing resist consumption (RRC) process that treats the surface of a substrate with a treatment composition before application of the photoresist to thus uniformly spread the photoresist throughout the surface of the substrate even with a small amount of photoresist, has been employed.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-188359 discloses an edge bead remover including propyleneglycol ether acetate and methyl α-hydroxyisobutyrate. However, this product cannot be used to the RRC process, although it may be used in EBR process and have excellent rework performance.
In addition, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-227770 discloses a thinner composition including propyleneglycol ether acetate and methyl 2-hydroxy-2-methyl propionate as well as ethyl lactate or ethyl 3-ethoxy propionate, as principal components, and further including a fluorine-based, non-ionic or ionic surfactant. However, if the surfactant is not contained, it is difficult to use the above composition in the RRC process. On the other hand, when the surfactant is included, the above composition may be employed in the RRC process, however, entail a problem of low rework performance since the surfactant remains on the surface of a wafer.
Accordingly, there is still a requirement for development of a treatment agent composition with high RRC efficiency while being sufficiently and reliably employed in the existing EBR process.